so ive been at this for a while now and i just cant seem to break through this plateau. started learning CW back in the spring, got up to about 13wpm pretty comfortably but now every time i try to push to 15 or even just 14 i fall apart and start counting dits and dahs again which i know is exactly what you're not supposed to do.

im using the Koch method with the G4FON trainer and i do about 20-30 minutes a day most days. someone at my local club told me to just crank the character speed up to like 20wpm even if i cant copy everything yet and just let my brain catch up, but that feels like a lot and honestly a little discouraging when i miss half the letters. is that actually the right approach or is there a better way to get from where i am to 20wpm without losing my mind. my goal is to be able to ragchew on 40m CW by next summer which doesnt feel that far off but also kind of does at this point.

yeah that plateau around 12-15wpm is super common, i went through the exact same thing and it lasted embarrassingly long before something clicked. the advice your club buddy gave you is actually solid, it's basically the Farnsworth method — you set the character speed high (20wpm is fine) but you increase the spacing between characters so you have more time to process each one before the next comes. G4FON lets you do this, theres a spacing setting in there somewhere. the whole point is to force your brain to hear the letters as sounds instead of counts, and if you're decoding at 13wpm you almost certainly still have some of that counting going on even if you think you don't.

what also helped me was just listening to real QSOs on the bands even when i couldnt copy everything. throw on 40m in the evening and just let it wash over you. you start to recognize rhythm and common words and phrases without even trying. took me maybe 3 or 4 weeks of doing that alongside my trainer sessions before i noticed a real difference. dont give up on it, the jump from 13 to 20 honestly feels huge but once you get there 20 feels slow.

I'm kind of in the same boat as you, stuck around 14 right now so watching this thread. One thing that helped me a little bit was doing short sessions more often instead of one long one — like 10 minutes in the morning and 10 at night instead of a 30 minute block. I read somewhere that sleep helps consolidate the learning or something like that. No idea if thats actually true but my copying did get a bit smoother after I switched it up.